A Pauline Integration of
Christianity into Cultural and Juridical Structures

Juan Manuel De Prada

The commemoration of this Pauline Year should serve us as an
incentive to reflect on one of St. Paul's most distinctive and brilliant
features, the impulse of universalism that was shortly to become a
constitutive element of faith in Jesus Christ.

It was a universalism that, in addition to bringing fulfilment to the
mission that Jesus had entrusted to his disciples, was to define the
innovative approach of Christianity as a religion that incorporated
pagan wisdom in its cultural patrimony.

This cultural assimilation transformed Christianity from the outset,
making it a religion different from any other. Whereas other religions
establish their identity by denying the cultural heritage that preceded
them, the Christian faith, thanks to St. Paul's genius, understood in
its new universal vocation, required it to be introduced into the
cultural, administrative and juridical structures of its age. This was
not in order to syncretize with them but to transform them radically
from within.

And St. Paul's brilliant illumination, which without a doubt came
from the Holy Spirit, must serve as a vigorous inspiration to us
Catholics today, who are all too often tempted to take a defensive
position against a hostile world.

St. Paul, born into a Jewish family at Tarsus in Cilicia, was also a
Roman citizen. This condition or juridical status helped him understand
that Christianity's vocation to universality would only be fully
achieved if it were successfully integrated into the structures of the
Empire that ruled the world.

It had to be integrated if people were to benefit from its vast
cultural heritage and the Empire's corruption was to be washed clean
from within. Christianity would not have managed to be what it actually
is if it had not made Rome's languages it own; or if it had not adopted
its laws, to humanize them later, founding a new law, penetrated by the
striking idea of personal redemption brought by the Gospel.

Christians could have been content to stay on the margins of the
Roman world, like people without a country secretly celebrating their
rites. By advancing further into the mouth of the wolf, armed with the
torches of their faith alone, they risked death in its jaws. Yet in the
end they kindled a blaze that would outlast the monuments of Rome.

Of what strong alloy was that man made who overturned the course of
history for ever? We know that Jewish and Hellenistic elements were
amalgamated in St. Paul's cultural background. He had an inexhaustible
knowledge of the Greek language, nourished by the Septuagint version of
the Scriptures.

However, at the same time he was distinguished by a far from
superficial knowledge of the Greek myths, as well as familiarity with
the Greek philosophers and poets. It suffices to read his discourse on
the Areopagus of Athens to be aware of his sound classical culture and
also, of course, of the modus operandi of his evangelizing
mission.

St. Paul began his discourse with reflections, in which Gentiles and
Christians could converge, based on citations from the philosophers. He
ended it, however, with the announcement of the Last Judgment, a
stumbling block for his audience —
which, as far as we know, included several Epicurean and Stoic
philosophers — and which was ready
to accept the immortality of the soul but not the resurrection of the
flesh.

That group of philosophers probably disbanded with the idea that Paul
was mentally unsound. Nevertheless, in ruminating on the words they had
heard, perhaps they realized that the principles on which St. Paul had
based his discourse could be understood through reason.

And these principles, understandable to a pagan
— which surfaced in the discourse on
the Areopagus — are the same ideas
that St. Paul incorporates in his Letters: the possibility of knowing
God through his Creation, the presence of a natural law engraved on
man's heart, submission to God's will as a fruit of our divine sonship.

These are the principles on which St. Paul was later to build his
prodigious Christological edifice. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of
those pagan philosophers who heard St. Paul.

How could they fail to feel challenged by a preaching that combined
in such a mysteriously captivating way principles that reason could
accept with theses that demanded the contribution of a new faith?

How could they fail to be challenged by this Mystery which rendered
what they were hearing congruent with what mere intelligence did not
permit them to penetrate? And, in seeking a deeper knowledge of that
Mystery, how could they fail to open themselves to the unheard-of
horizons of freedom and hope that Christ brought?

This, then, is how it happened. And the Pauline genius teaches us
that it can continue to happen today. To a Roman patrician such as
Philemon, it must have seemed no stranger to grant his slave Onesimus
freedom, accepting him as a "beloved brother" in the Lord, than it must
seem to a person of our time, for example, to abhor abortion.

If the Pauline genius influenced a Roman patrician to renounce his
rights of ownership over another man, albeit recognized by law, why can
we not help the people of our epoch recover the concept of the
sacredness of human life, although the laws of our time seem to have
forgotten it?

To do this, we must use words that are intelligible to our
contemporaries — just as in his time
Paul with his genius succeeded — in
order to move a culture that has drifted away from God from within,
without alienating it.

We, in this neo-pagan society, must return to preaching that God was
not made man to ascend a throne, but rather to share in human
limitations, to feel the same sufferings as men and women, to accompany
them on their earthly pilgrimage. Moreover, in making himself man, God
ensured that human life, every human life, would be sacred.

St. Paul succeeded in making himself understood by the people of his
time and thus transformed into reality the indispensable mission that we
Christians have in the world. It is described sublimely in the
Epistle to Diognetus: "The Christian is to the world what the soul
is to the body. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the
body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained
in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. Such is
the Christian's lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is
not permitted to excuse himself".

Holding a defensive position against the world is equivalent to
abandoning the place that God has assigned to us. The Pauline genius
teaches us that we may continue to be the soul of the world without
relinquishing our principles and without denying our essence.

Taken from:
L'Osservatore Romano
Weekly Edition in English
19 November 2008, page 9

L'Osservatore Romano is the newspaper of the Holy See.
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